Anesthesiology

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Welcome to the Department of Anesthesiology

 
The Department of Anesthesiology at Boston Medical Center strives to offer exceptional care, without exception to patients undergoing surgery and chronic pain-related procedures. Boston Medical Center performs approximately 20,000 cases per year of all types, including pediatric and obstetrical procedures and complex minimally invasive robotic cardiac and urological operations. Additionally, BMC is a nationally recognized Level One trauma center.

The Department of Anesthesiology is dynamic with a number of recent achievements, including:

• Our Chairman, Dr. Keith Lewis, became a Hospital Examiner for the Baldrige National Quality Program. Each year the Baldrige National Quality Program gives an award to outstanding groups in business, manufacturing service, education and health care. Within each field, the examiners for this award are considered experts in quality and business. It is a great honor for our Department to be represented in this prestigious group.
  
  
• The Department, under the leadership of Dr. Lewis, won the 2008 National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems Safety Net Award in the category of patient safety for our surgical site infections improvement project (SSI).
  
  
• The Department published various articles in the past academic year. Several members of the faculty contributed chapters in a textbook soon to be published. An article on the history of inhalation anesthesia, in which we discuss Boston University’s Doris Appel’s Hall of Medicine, was published in Anesthesiology, the leading journal in our specialty. Also we have developed several procedural videos published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
  
  
• We have introduced the Computerized Anesthesia Record (Picis Anesthesia Manager) to Boston Medical Center and now anesthesia record-keeping is fully computerized in all operating rooms.
  
  
• Our staff has been visiting faculty at various institutions across the country and abroad including Yale University, Harvard University and University of Miami. We have lectured in Spain, South Africa, Colombia and other Latin American countries.
  
  
• This year we hosted our 5th Annual Ellison Pierce Symposium, during which we had a  number of attendees from 30 different states.
  
  
• Dr. Ruben Azocar became an Oral Examiner for the American Board of Anesthesiology and recently obtained a grant to develop an educational curriculum in the field of geriatrics.
  
  
• Our residency program continues to excel. Recent graduates were accepted to competitive fellowships or received attractive job offers from prestigious practices. In recognition of our educational quality, the ACGME has increased the number of positions by six, resulting in a total of 27 positions (nine per year).

The Department of Anesthesiology remains a strong provider of clinical care as well as a superb educational resource for both medical students and residents.